Film reviews: The Fantastic Four: First Steps and Cloud

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

Directed by Matt Shakman (PG-13)

★★★

"They say the third time's the charm, and when it comes to the Fantastic Four, that just might be true," said Maureen Lee Lenker in Entertainment Weekly. In both 2005 and 2015, Marvel failed to build decent movies around the superhero quartet, but the new reboot "leans into the comic book kitschiness inherent to the material" and winds up with an action adventure that feels "retro cool." Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby play married astronauts who've become known as Mr. Fantastic and Invisible Woman since the space mishap that gave them superpowers while turning little-brother Johnny into the Human Torch and friend Ben Grimm into the Thing.

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The movie eventually becomes a parable about how to be a true savior, but it's "at its best" when it's skimming along on the strengths of "its space-race sense of wonder." All four featured actors "nicely inhabit" their roles, said Brian Truitt in USA Today, and "Kirby especially shines in grounding a fantastical narrative in heartfelt emotion." When not invisible, she's Sue Storm—pregnant with a baby who becomes a potential trading chip when a planet-devouring being named Galactus offers to spare Earth if he can take the child. From that point on, the biggest gripe you may have with this Fantastic Four is that its appealing heroes get pushed aside by its villains. Still, the movie "has enough actor-based charm to distract from its jankiest effects, plus a damn cool Silver Surfer, and a zippy pace," said Jesse Hassenger in The A.V. Club. "For a lot of Marvel fans, it will be more than enough."

Cloud

Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (R)

★★★

"Kiyoshi Kurosawa has always made films that explore the fault lines in modern society," said John Powers in NPR.org. In his "strangely gripping" latest thriller, it's the internet that's threatening to pull us all under as we watch Yoshii, a young online reseller, exploit so many fellow humans that they finally team up to seek bloody retribution. After a first half that's "grubbily down-to-earth," the film plunges into "a tense, exceedingly long action sequence in which Yoshii must fight for his survival." But Kurosawa doesn't glamorize the violence or even present us a hero. In fact, "the only character in Cloud who seems happy is the one you suspect may be Satan."

Kurosawa, a prolific Japanese filmmaker best known for 1997's Cure and 2001's Pulse, "has a knack for embedding ideas within action," said Justin Chang in The New Yorker. Watching Yoshii's online victims chasing revenge, "you can imagine real-life versions of this grim scenario—perhaps already being arranged in corners of the dark web—in which people pay for the opportunity to hunt down their enemies as a form of recreation." In the internet-tainted world Cloud shows us, "a will to annihilate our chosen nemeses might be the only honest human impulse we have left." Don't expect realism, said Zachary Barnes in The Wall Street Journal. Kurosawa's "unnerving" latest is "a fable of a man besieged." Thanks to the internet and its amorality, "Yoshii has become loathed by everyone he knows."